This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

This chapter explores the accuracy of private transcription services when transcribing Black English and Standard American English. Courts and lawyers in the US regularly rely on transcripts from such services, but third-party verification of their accuracy, especially with respect to their quality when faced with nonstandard language varieties, is lacking. This study draws on experimental methods to contrast the quality of transcription services offered by transcribers and AI route. The quantitative results show that transcription by humans and AI resulted in more mistakes when transcribing Black English than when transcribing Standard American English. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis reveals that these mistakes often changed or obscured meaning in legally relevant ways. If these results are generalizable, many transcripts currently in circulation, and crucial both to justice at the trial level and appellate review, contain disproportionately more legally important mistakes for Black English speakers. Given that Black English speakers are a highly overrepresented population in the US criminal system, the chapter proposes ways of redressing transcription shortcomings.

Chapter 1 surveys the landscape in contemporary religious epistemology and identifies seven main options for evaluating arguments for the existence of God. The chapter then articulates a mediating position by drawing on selected aspects of these options and concludes by looking at the neglected epistemological work of Jeffrey Stout.

This chapter focuses on the production of official records of police–suspect interviews in England & Wales, and the flaws in their current use as criminal evidence. It reveals the importance of the administrative processes undergone by an interviewee’s words post-interview, revealing how they shape – indeed, create – the resulting evidential product, especially through the institutional practice of summarising parts of the interaction. The journey from ‘live’ interaction in an interview room to an official evidential record is largely taken for granted within the legal system, with little-to-no internal or external scrutiny; this chapter argues that it should instead be recognised as a substantial contribution to – and transformation of – the resulting evidence, with all the dangers that potentially entails. Using data from the ‘For The Record’ project, including interview recordings and official police records alongside focus groups with practitioners, it demonstrates the importance for practitioners and researchers alike to pay closer attention to the format of the data they are examining, and to actively reflect on and seek out the many voices and actors which have shaped it.

This chapter reflects on a case involving a pediatric patient with a rare neurogenerative disease whose medical team requested an ethics consultation when his parents disagreed with the medical recommendation to remove his breathing tube, knowing that this could lead to his death. The ethics consultation explored what at first appeared to be conflicting beliefs about the facts of this patient’s condition and quality of life: his medical team believed he had an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that would become progressively more debilitating and uncomfortable; his parents believed that he may still recover from his disease and survive. Yet on deeper analysis, we came to see that this was not a case of a medical team holding true beliefs and a family holding false beliefs about the clinical facts of the matter, but rather a difference between ways of being in and seeing the world, particularly as it relates to reasoning from a position of faith in what might be. This case shows the importance of differentiating between claims about facts and assertions of values, and how biomedical expectations of evidence can influence perceptions of relevant information during a clinical ethics consultation.

The focus of this book is the uniform Evidence Act (referred to throughout as ‘the Act’ or ‘the Acts’). The Act has not been introduced in Queensland, South Australia or Western Australia, where each state’s Evidence Act and the common law apply. However, the Act is still an important reference guide for those states due to the connection between the common law and the Act. Despite the differences between jurisdictions that have adopted the Act, there is a significant degree of uniformity. Accordingly, in this book, the provisions that are extracted to indicate the rules in relation to the Act come from the Commonwealth Act. Any important jurisdictional differences are separately identified.

This chapter considers the legislative history of evidence law and some fundamental introductory concepts that are used frequently in evidence law and the trial process. This chapter is an introductory overview; specific topics are dealt with in substance in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 5 trains its attention on evidentiary practices, continuing to ask how law apprehends its world. The discussion reveals that legal actors have had a troubled relation with expert evidence. As with preceding chapters, a critical orientation is brought in to explicate law’s evidentiary reductivity (manageability of contingency and complexity) – to argue that the law has been unpredictable and unprincipled in how it has registered torture’s lifeworld. The pertinent questions here become: How does law interact with the natural and social sciences in the recognition of torture? What types of knowledge and evidence count towards legal recognition? What types are effaced and rendered inadmissible?

The development of continuous distribution (CD) proposals for lungs, kidneys, pancreases, and livers display the interrelationship of values and evidence. CD involves identifying attributes that assess progress toward five goals: (1) prioritize sickest candidates first to reduce waitlist deaths; (2) improve long-term survival after transplant; (3) increase transplant opportunities for patients who are medically harder to match; (4) increase transplant opportunities for candidates with distinct characteristics, such as pediatric and prior living donor status; (5) promote efficient management of organ placement through consideration of geographic proximity between donor hospitals and patient transplant centers. Weights are then assigned to the attributes and goals to obtain a composite priority score. Both values and evidence influenced the choice of attributes and their functional forms. Rather than primarily statements of values, weights became design features in machine learning optimization exercises that allowed for the identification of alternatives that predicted the most favorable combinations of efficiency and equity outcomes.

It is discussed in more detail how perceptions relate to propositional knowledge. In doing so, “myths” of the perceptual Given are evaluated. One myth is that a mere perception can itself justify propositions, or ground assertoric judgments, and that it can therefore be a foundational justifier. This is the Myth of the Given in Sellars and McDowell. Kant would deny that intuitions can justify propositions independently of conceptual content, be it infallibly or fallibly. After all, he makes the well-known complementarity claim about cognition “in the proper sense,” according to which intuitions without concepts are blind. However, as argued in the preceding chapters, their blindness does not entail that they do not have epistemic power in their own right.